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    Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside
    Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside
    Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside
    Ebook685 pages8 hours

    Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside

    By Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka

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    Not only is Doctor Who the longest-running science fiction TV show in history, but it has also been translated into numerous languages, broadcast around the world, and referred to as the way of the future” by some British politicians. The Classic Doctor Who series built up a loyal American cult following, with regular conventions and other activities. The new series, relaunched in 2005, has emerged from culthood into mass awareness, with a steadily growing viewership and major sales of DVDs. The current series, featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, is breaking all earlier records, in both the UK and the US.

    Doctor Who is a continuing story about the adventures of a mysterious alien known as the Doctor,” a traveller of both time and space whose spacecraft is the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space), which from the outside looks like a British police telephone box of the 1950s. The TARDIS is bigger on the inside than on the outside”actually the interior is immense. The Doctor looks human, but has two hearts, and a knowledge of all languages in the universe. Periodically, when the show changes the leading actor, the Doctor regenerates.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Court
    Release dateOct 22, 2010
    ISBN9780812697254
    Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside
    Author

    Courtland Lewis

    Courtland Lewis is an Instructor of Philosophy at Owensboro Community and Technical College. He is co-editor of Doctor Who and Philosophy, More Doctor Who and Philosophy, and Red Rising and Philosophy and editor of Divergent and Philosophy.

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      Doctor Who and Philosophy - Courtland Lewis

      EPISODE 1

      I’m the Doctor. Who?

      Personal Identity and the Doctor

      1

      Just as I Was Getting to Know Me

      PATRICK STOKES

      Poisoned by spectrox toxaemia, having selflessly used the last of the antidote to save his companion, our hero collapses on the floor and says his goodbyes. "I might regenerate, I don’t know . . . feels different this time ... He begins to hallucinate: visions of his former companions, both living and dead, urge him to fight for life, while his arch-enemy, the Master, gloatingly orders him to die. Then a strange flash of light, and an instant later a vastly different figure, wearing the same clothes but now a couple of sizes too tight, sits bolt upright and surveys his new body. His perplexed companion manages a confused Doctor? To which he haughtily replies: You were expecting someone else? And we all breathe a sigh of relief that the Doctor has survived yet another brush with death and lives on to fight another day (The Caves of Androzani," 1984).

      Or does he? And just who lives on? And what counts as living on, exactly?

      As we know, in the Doctor Who universe, a major quirk of Time Lord biology is the capacity to regenerate: to acquire, in times of major physiological trauma, a new body. This can occur up to twelve times, giving each Time Lord a total of thirteen different bodies. Of course, a main character who can simply get a completely new body in times of mortal peril does tend to deflate the dramatic tension somewhat. To compensate, all manner of elaborate plot-points have been built in to keep us guessing each time, such as the mysterious Watcher who assists Four’s transition into Five in Logopolis (1981), to the Zero Room that Five needed to recover in immediately afterwards (Castrovalva, 1982), to Six’s post-regenerative derangement (The Twin Dilemma, 1984).

      For most people, the idea of a greatly-extended lifespan with bodily regeneration thrown in has something irresistible about it. To the elderly, the sick and the just plain hung-over alike, the idea of getting a totally new body sounds like a pretty sweet deal: complete physical renewal, restored energy and vigor, and, if you’re particularly lucky, the looks of David Tennant (assuming you’re male—though admittedly the non-canonical The Curse of Fatal Death, 1999 suggests that mightn’t be mandatory). But philosophers are notoriously unpleasant people, and confronted with something as cool as regeneration, we immediately start asking a whole bunch of annoying questions. So here goes: when the Doctor regenerates, who wakes up, exactly?

      That sounds like a perfectly stupid question with an obvious answer: the Doctor. He simply undergoes a physiological change, albeit a very big, very dramatic one; sort of like an ultra-accelerated, radical form of puberty, complete with the changing voice and temporary awkwardness. But consider what’s happening in a typical regeneration: a bodily organism, on the verge of dying (or, as in the 1996 Doctor Who movie, already dead for several hours), undergoes a complete physical transformation. It’s never made exactly clear whether the atoms in his body are replaced, but for the sake of conforming with known physical laws wherever possible, let’s assume they aren’t. So, some or all of the matter within his body is re-arranged and as a result, the person who wakes up from the regeneration process has a very different appearance and character from his predecessor. His tastes and dress sense alter considerably each time, and his disposition towards the people around him also swings wildly between compassion, amiability, arrogance, and downright manipulativeness. There can even be physiological problems, such as the Fifth Doctor’s gas allergy (The Caves of Androzani) that seem specific to the new incarnation.

      The question is, what features of the situation we’ve just described count as survival? What allows us to say that the person or self (call it what you will) who undergoes the regeneration is the same as the person who wakes up afterwards? Why can’t we rather say that the pre-regeneration Doctor ceases to exist and is replaced by another person who shares the bulk of the previous person’s memories and concerns? Looked at that way, regeneration isn’t survival at all, but actually a form of death. Yet, Time Lords themselves clearly don’t think of it as death—witness the Master’s decision in Last of the Time Lords (2007) to die rather than regenerate, or the Fifth Doctor’s Is this death? quoted above. These questions belong to a problem that’s been raging, on this planet at least, for hundreds of years: the infamous Problem of Personal Identity, which William James once described as the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal.¹

      The Most Puzzling Puzzle

      Since John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the puzzle of personal identity has driven more people to the point of insanity than staring into the Untempered Schism. Before Locke, the default assumption in Christendom was that the soul was the bearer of identity, though resurrection was still seen as a bodily process of some sort. With Descartes (1641), the soul found philosophical expression as the res cogitans, the thinking substance that I find myself to be, and which controls my organic body. Locke, however, claimed that the identity of the self was distinct from both the identity of the organism and that of the thinking substance (if it exists). Locke argued that the one person could have multiple successive thinking substances and yet still be the same person; on the other hand, if I somehow had Socrates’s soul, I still wouldn’t necessarily be Socrates. To be the same self—and this was a really radical thing to say at the time—it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have the same soul.

      Yet, Locke went on to claim that if selves aren’t souls, they aren’t bodies either. If a cobbler and a prince somehow swap minds in their sleep, we’d say that the prince wakes up in the cobbler’s body and vice versa, not that the prince wakes up with the mind of a cobbler. ² What Locke saw is that when we’re confronted with imaginary situations where mind and body come apart like this, our intuition is that personal identity follows the psychological facts rather the physical ones. Drawing on this intuition, modern-day neo-Lockeans have claimed that some form of psychological continuity across time is what constitutes selfhood. To be the same self across time is to have some sort of psychological relatedness hold between person-stages across time.

      If we buy that, then it seems there’s simply no question about regeneration: the person left immediately after a Time Lord regenerates is the same person who was there beforehand. Admittedly, he’s very different: his height, build, and apparent physical age alter each time. But as we’ve seen, the differences go deeper than that: the Doctor’s psychological disposition, temperament, and tastes all seem to change radically. Indeed, the Doctor’s various incarnations have such alarmingly different personalities that when confronted with each other, they each treat each other with barely-disguised contempt. Derek Parfit’s example of the young socialist who imagines with horror the conservative he knows he’ll one day become,³ or the example of a repentant criminal looking back on his former life, mirrors the Doctor’s reaction upon meeting his other incarnations. The Doctor seems so emotionally alienated from the past selves he remembers being that he feels as if he’s not them on some level. I’m definitely not the man I was declares a relieved Five after meeting three of his previous incarnations in The Five Doctors (1983, an episode I’ll be discussing a lot from here on), the flippant tone barely hiding his distance from the past selves he encounters.

      Self and Memory

      Given these enormous changes in temperament and personality, what sort of psychological connections might hold between pre-and post-regeneration Doctors that would make them the same person? Locke himself isn’t actually much help here; he simply spoke of sameness of consciousness across time:

      For as far as any intelligent Being can repeat the Idea of any past Action with the same Consciousness it has of it at first, and with the same Consciousness it has of any present Action; so far is it the same personal Self. For it is by the Consciousness it has of its present Thoughts and Actions, that it is Self to it Self now, and so will be the same Self, as far as the same Consciousness can extend to Actions past, or to come . . . (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 336)

      Locke’s Enlightenment successors, at least, all thought they knew what he was talking about here: memory. Insofar as I can (genuinely) remember the events in a person’s life, I am that person. And what’s really amazing is that in The Five Doctors, the Doctor himself endorses this Memory Criterion view of personal identity. As a mysterious figure, later revealed (spoiler alert!) to be Lord High President Borusa, kidnaps Doctors One through Four from their respective eras, the Fifth Doctor experiences a painful cosmic angst. He puts this down to the loss of his past: I’m being diminished, whittled away piece by piece. A man is the sum of his memories, you know, a Time Lord even more so. Leaving aside the question of why this cosmic angst only strikes at one particular moment, it seems the Doctor is siding with Locke on this one. The Doctor is his past selves because he remembers being them; as he can recall their experiences, he and they are connected across time by memory, in a way that counts as their being the same person.

      Yet even the Memory Criterion—the sonic screwdriver of neo-Lockean identity theorists—won’t get us out of this one. In episodes like The Three Doctors (1973), The Five Doctors, and The Two Doctors (1985) the Doctor interacts with former and future selves who apparently have completely forgotten the dramatic events they are now living through for the second, third, and fifth time (the Fourth Doctor gets stuck).

      You’d think after finding yourself in the Death Zone four times you’d at least remember that Borusa turns out to be the bad guy. And this opens up the Doctor’s sum of his memories theory to a serious objection first raised against Locke by the eighteenth-century philosophers Thomas Reid and Joseph Butler. Identity is normally understood, according to classical logic, as a one-to-one relationship: either a and b are the same person, or they aren’t. There’s no in-between. But, says Reid, imagine that a young boy is thrashed for stealing some fruit from an orchard. Years later, he has become a gallant soldier, and captures a flag in battle. Later still, as an old man, he attains the rank of General. Now, the gallant soldier remembers being thrashed as a boy, and the aged General remembers capturing the flag as a young man—but the General no longer remembers the childhood thrashing. But if memory confers identity, that means that the boy is the same person as the soldier, the soldier is the same person as the general, but the general isn’t the same person as the boy.⁴ And logically, that’s an intolerable violation of the principle of transitivity: if a = b and b = c, then a must equal c, and here it doesn’t.

      The Five Doctors takes this problem and amplifies it. Despite his normally quite decent personal memory (after all, he remembers things that happened hundreds of years ago), the Doctor apparently doesn’t remember at least the events of this episode from one incarnation to the next. Here it’s not even a question of transitivity: there’s just no continuity of memory between these people. Still, perhaps all this can be explained away; maybe meeting your previous selves somehow wipes parts of your memory. And besides, all modern philosophers who have defended the Memory Criterion view of personal identity have had to try to account for the fact that it seems our identity isn’t destroyed every time we forget where we left our car keys.

      Meeting Yourself

      But identity, as traditionally understood, presents other problems in the multi-Doctor episodes. There’s a pretty good philosophical reason why the First Law of Time prohibits meeting one’s former and future selves: when this occurs, we are faced with multiple, independently-acting selves, who nevertheless all claim to be the same person. And that violates the standard picture of numerical identity as a logical relation, whereby one object can’t be in two places at once and still be the same object.

      When multiple Doctors converge within a single point in time, we have a particularly elaborate version of what Parfit christened a Branch-Line Case (Reasons and Persons, pp. 199-201). Parfit’s idea is this: suppose we have a process for teleporting you from, let’s say, Gallifrey to Skaro. You step into the teleporter on Gallifrey and it records every single bit of information about you: your complete physical makeup, the state and position of every neuron in your brain, everything. Then it disintegrates you. At exactly that moment, the information is beamed to Skaro, where another machine uses it to create a perfect replica of you out of organic materials. Because your brain has been perfectly recreated, the person who steps out onto the surface of Skaro (presumably being blasted by Daleks moments later, thus teaching that person a valuable lesson about not visiting nuclear wastelands populated entirely by murderous cyborgs) will have all the Gallifrey-person’s memories, up to and including the memory of stepping into the teleporter booth and pressing the go button.

      How do we describe this case? Have you been teleported from Gallifrey to Skaro, or have you died and been replaced by a perfect replica on Skaro? Have you survived? Would this be as good as survival, slightly worse, or much worse? Well, now Parfit adds a new twist: suppose that the machine on Gallifrey gives you a few minutes before it disintegrates you, while on Skaro you have already been assembled. On Gallifrey you even get to talk to your replica on Skaro via video intercom: you find yourself speaking to someone who looks exactly like you, has all your memories, concerns, quirks, loves, hates, projects and commitments. Yet you’re able to hold a conversation with this person (Look out for Daleks!) just as if they’re another person. In this case, the soon-to-be-disintegrated person on Gallifrey constitutes a Branch Line of the self.

      And you can see now why the multi-Doctor episodes provide an example of a Branch Line Case. The Doctor’s incarnations interact with each other in the same way as in the Gallifrey-Skaro case. Even in The Five Doctors when they attempt to unite their minds to overcome Borusa’s mind control over the Fifth Doctor, they seem to do so as multiple agents working co-operatively, not as a single agent. Unlike the Branch Line case, though, the different selves are quite dissimilar. What they share is most of their memories, their projects, and commitments (saving the universe from evil, defeating enemies such as the Master and the Cybermen, and so forth), and a name. Are these facts enough to make them all the same person?

      Deep Further Facts?

      For Parfit, facts like this are all there really is to it; if I know the degrees to which a person’s memory and character have persisted across time, well, that’s all there is to know. There’s no underlying deep further fact (like, say, a soul) that confers identity in the logical sense (p. 309). Each of us is simply more or less psychologically related to selves that existed in the past or will exist in the future—and that means there’s nothing particularly special about those past and future selves being me or not. Accordingly, says Parfit, personal identity isn’t what matters in survival.

      Teleportation might not count as the survival of the same person, but it doesn’t seem exactly like (or exactly as bad as) death, either (p. 215). And it’s quite possible that regeneration might be preferable to death, even if the pre- and post-regeneration Doctors aren’t strictly numerically identical in the logical sense. So long as there’s someone with a reasonably good degree of psychological continuity with the previous person, someone to pilot the TARDIS and deal with the occasional Sontaran, then we need-n’t trouble ourselves with unanswerable questions about whether they’re the same self or not. But is that intuitively satisfying? Doesn’t it still seem important that he’s the same person before and after regeneration?

      If we still want to ask questions about whether there’s one, ten, or millions of Doctors (according to some theories, we actually have a vast series of selves that each only last for a matter of seconds), ⁵ we might turn to Robert Nozick’s Closest Continuer theory. On this theory, to be identical with some former person is just to be the Closest Continuer of that former person. This has a certain plausibility to it: the pre- and post-regeneration Doctors are the same person if, and only if, the properties of the post-regeneration Doctor stem from, grow out of, are causally dependent on the pre-regeneration Doctor’s properties, and there’s no other person that stands in a closer (or as close) relationship to the pre-regeneration Doctor.⁶ But again, there’s clearly no deep fact about identity here either.

      In The Trial of a Timelord (1986), the nefarious prosecutor known as the Valeyard turns out to be both a distillation of the Doctor’s own dark side and one of his potential future incarnations (somewhere between your twelfth and thirteenth regeneration, whatever that might mean), scheming to get control of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations and thus become actualized. Closest Continuer theory would have to say that had he succeeded, the Valeyard would be the Doctor, as his closest surviving continuer, whereas if he’d failed, he wouldn’t be. And many philosophers find that unsatisfying, because it means that personal identity depends upon completely external factors that might have nothing to do with the Doctor at all: had the Valeyard slipped in the shower and died on the morning when he otherwise would certainly have killed the Doctor, that would make it true that he had never been the Doctor.

      Person-Stages, Animals, and Narratives

      Or we could try the Four Dimensionalist approach. According to this theory, what we might call person-stages exist at particular times, but persons only exist across time, as the sum of all the person stages .⁷ So the relation between person-stages and the person that they’re a part of is sort of like the relation between the British Monarch, who in a sense never dies (because there’s always someone we can point to and say, that’s the British Monarch), and the various people who’ve held that title, all but one of whom are now dead. So if we’re Four Dimensionalists, the Doctor’s various incarnations can be viewed as person-stages that together make up one person, namely, the Doctor. This looks promising, especially as it fits in with our habit of speaking of different Doctors, while still insisting they’re all one person. But there’s the problem: if person-stages are walking, talking, thinking, acting things, things that can talk about themselves and think for themselves, then that implies that when someone acts, there are two actors present: a person-stage and a person. Hence we’d have to say that the Seventh Doctor and the Doctor defeat the gods of Ragnarok (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, 1988-89), or that both the Fourth Doctor and the Doctor simultaneously offer you a jelly baby. And this raises far more problems than it solves. After all, if someone said, "I just met both the American President and Barack Obama," at a time when Barack Obama is still the American President, you’d think they were either speaking metaphorically or were confused as to who the current President is.

      So what’s left? We could reject neo-Lockeanism altogether and try Animalism, a currently popular theory that a self simply is an animal rather than something that goes along with that animal. Hence I just am this particular human animal, and the Doctor just is this particular Gallifreyan animal. There are several problems with Animalism, not least the lack of agreement as to just what Animalism claims, exactly, but it’s far from clear how an Animalist could account for the huge disruptions in organic continuity between Doctors—not to mention Romana’s apparent ability to adopt a body from another species altogether, as seen in Destiny of the Daleks (1979).

      Alternatively we could drop the strict logical understanding of identity and instead buy into another popular theory, the Narrative Identity thesis. Again, this theory comes in several flavors, offered by thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Dennett, and Paul Ricoeur. What Narrative theorists broadly have in common is the claim that selves are (or at least are like) stories: just as the plot unifies all the events in an episode of Doctor Who into a single comprehensible story, so, they claim, a narrative shapes a set of physical, biological, psychological and social facts, spread out across time, into the coherent story of a particular self. What I am is the lead character in one, or more accurately a great many, stories; my self is the center of narrative gravity where these various stories intersect.

      But again, the multi-Doctor episodes present huge challenges for these theories. What sort of narrative can I tell about myself when I can meet and interact with my former person-stages as if they’re separate actors in my story, or when former person-stages can apparently be taken out of my time-line (The Five Doctors) or threatened with a non-existence that causes me to fade away (The Two Doctors)? It’s one thing to be the main character in my own story and a bit player in someone else’s, but how can I be a bit player in my own story?

      A Dead End?

      And so we seem to have come to a halt, even though I clearly haven’t answered the question about whether the Doctor pre- and post-regeneration is the same person. It seems we want to say he’s the same person—we care that the same person survives rather than just that there always be a Doctor—but we haven’t found any theory that can account for even normal human identity, let alone the special features created by regeneration. But the very fact that after trying to disenchant personal identity in the way we have, we still care about the question Is he still the Doctor? seems to tell us something. The poisoned Fifth Doctor clearly sees two options before him: death or regeneration. Whatever we might tell him about the objective lack of continuity between him and his successor surely can’t stop this subjective concern for his future self as himself. And perhaps that’s where the answer lies: maybe the Doctor is the Doctor because each incarnation looks upon the others with concern and passion as being itself. Perhaps identity isn’t a matter of objective continuity—of psychology, physiology, narrative, or whatever—but of some form of subjective attitude, whereby my past and future selves are me because I somehow acknowledge or appropriate them as such. In other words, maybe what makes the Doctor the Doctor is that he continually takes ownership of or responsibility for the vastly different bodies and personalities that constitute the career of "the Doctor," even when they occasionally meet and interact as separate agents. What such a form of subjective appropriation might involve, however, isn’t entirely clear, and there isn’t space here to try to flesh it out.

      So, all I’ve really done here is raised a lot of difficult questions, proposed some possible answers, shown why none of them seems to work, and then gestured vaguely towards where the answer might lie with a frustrating lack of clarity and precision. As I said, philosophers are thoroughly unpleasant people. Still, looking at the paradoxical, mind-bogglingingly puzzling puzzle that Locke got us into centuries ago, it’s hard not to think that the Doctor would approve of the confusion.⁸

      2

      Who Is the Doctor? For That Matter, Who Are You?

      GREG LITTMANN

      In 1966, William Hartnell, the first actor to play the Doctor, retired from the role. At the conclusion of The Tenth Planet the Doctor declared this old body is getting a bit thin and lay on the TARDIS floor. His features melted away and his face, body and personality changed forever, a process that was to become known as regeneration.

      The man who stood up looked and sounded like actor Patrick Troughton, but claimed to be the Doctor. What had happened? Had the Doctor been replaced by someone else or had he just changed form? Companions Ben and Polly weren’t at all sure at the time, but for almost fifty years now, viewers have been asked to accept that what look like eleven different men are really all the same person: the Doctor. But what makes him the same person when so much about him is different each time? In other words, what makes the Doctor the Doctor rather than someone else?

      You might think that tough questions about personal identity are not liable to arise outside of science fiction. However, philosophers have been arguing for many centuries about what constitutes personal identity (that is, about what makes you you) and are still arguing about it passionately to this day.

      The fact that something happens in Doctor Who doesn’t mean that it could happen in real life. No sane person would argue that time travel must be possible because they saw the TARDIS do it on television, or that matter must be able to appear out of nowhere because a normal-sized man turned into a huge scorpion-monster in The Lazarus Experiment (2007). However, thinking about imaginary situations can help us realize that there are gaps and inconsistencies in our theories. For example, we might have a theory that it’s always wrong to break a promise, but this theory has trouble standing in the face of the hypothetical question, What if you had promised someone that you would go out vandalizing cars with them?

      Fans of Tom Baker will recall that the Doctor uses just such a hypothetical to decide in Genesis of the Daleks (1975) that it would be immoral to wipe the Daleks out. As he stands ready to destroy them, he asks whether, if shown a child and told that it would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, it would be moral to kill that child. He concludes that it wouldn’t be and thus that it wouldn’t be moral to wipe out the Daleks. The fact that nobody is really offering the Doctor a child to kill is beside the point—the hypothetical shows that the Doctor has a contradiction in his beliefs and he changes his views accordingly. Similarly, what we are going to be doing by examining the issue of personal identity through the lens of Doctor Who is not to treat the show as if it were real, but to mine it for hypothetical situations against which we can test the comprehensiveness and consistency of our theories about personal identity.

      Are You Your Body?

      So, back to the question at hand: what constitutes personal identity? That is, what makes you you, what makes the Doctor the Doctor, and what makes anybody else themselves? One natural theory is that personal identity is constituted by bodily identity—that to be the same person is to have the same body. We certainly do use sameness of bodies to identify people. When you meet your friend in the street and say Hello you identify this person as your friend by the fact that the body you see looks just like the body your friend has always had.

      So far, so good. But if being the same person is a matter of having the same body, what constitutes having the same body? It can’t be a matter of having a body with exactly the same form, for at least two reasons. Firstly, we can track sameness of body through bodily changes. Viewers of Doctor Who are very familiar with such changes.

      • Most obviously, the Doctor’s body alters its size and shape every time he regenerates.

      • Similarly, the William Hartnell Doctor’s body is turned invisible in The Celestial Toymaker (1966),

      • the Patrick Troughton Doctor’s companion Jamie has his body first turned into cardboard and then reshaped with a new face in The Mind Robber (1968),

      • the Jon Pertwee Doctor encounters the humanoid Solonians who transform into insect-like creatures in The Mutants (1972),

      • the Tom Baker Doctor meets the Rutans who are able to shape-change at will in The Horror of Fang Rock (1977),

      • the Colin Baker Doctor’s companion Peri grows feathers in Vengeance on Varos (1985),

      • the Sylvester McCoy Doctor’s companion Ace grows cat’s eyes in Survival (1989),

      • and, most dramatically of all, the Peter Davison Doctor finds that the Brigadier has shaved off his famous mustache in Mawdryn Undead (1983).

      The new series is no less rich in examples, with the David Tennant Doctor meeting shape-changing Krillitane in School Reunion (2006), people who have been turned into pig hybrids in Daleks in Manhattan (2007), and even a woman who’s transformed into a talking paving slab in Love and Monsters (2006).

      In all of these cases, we’re expected to find it intelligible that the person after the transformation is the same person who was there beforehand, despite the change in their bodies. Of course, bodily changes occur in real life too, even if they’re not always as dramatic—we grow old, we gain scars or injuries and, like the Brigadier, we sometimes modify our hair. Unless we accept that every time such a change occurs the old body is gone and a new body appears, we’re going to have to allow that sameness of body over time doesn’t consist in sameness of features over time.

      A second problem with insisting that sameness of body over time consists in sameness of features is that more than one body can have the same set of features. Once again, examples of this are found throughout Doctor Who. Surprisingly often, people turn out to have doubles; for example, the Hartnell Doctor meets his double, the Abbot of Amboise, in sixteenth-century France in The Massacre (1964), the Troughton Doctor meets his double, the twenty-first century world-dictator Salamander in The Enemy of the World (1967), the Davison Doctor’s companion Nyssa meets her double, Ann Talbot, in 1920s England in Black Orchid (1982), and the Colin Baker Doctor just happens to look exactly like the captain of the guard on Gallifrey in The Invasion of Time (1978).

      As if that weren’t trouble enough, people are constantly being impersonated by shape-changing aliens, such as when the Troughton Doctor’s companion Polly is impersonated by a Chameleon in The Faceless Ones (1967), the Tom Baker Doctor’s companion Harry is impersonated by a Zygon in Terror of the Zygons (1975), the Davison Doctor is impersonated by Omega in Arc of Infinity (1983), and the Tennant Doctor meets a Krillitane who is impersonating the headmaster of an English school in School Reunion. There’s even an entire race of clones in the form of the Sontarans, who definitely don’t take themselves to be the same individual: the Sontaran met by Sarah Jane Smith in The Sontaran Experiment (1975) states very clearly that he isn’t Lynx, whom she met in The Time Warrior (1973), but Styre.

      In all of these cases—natural doubles and deliberate copies alike—the viewer is easily able to understand that these aren’t the same person with the same body, but rather two or more different people, despite the fact that their bodies seem to be physically indistinguishable. Similarly, in real life, we can be confronted with twins or doubles and easily understand that these are two bodies and not one, belonging to two people, not one. So again, it seems that being the same body isn’t a matter of having the same form.

      Worms in the Space-Time Continuum

      Let’s take one last stab at finding personal identity through bodily identity. Perhaps we can find sameness of body through tracking continuity of location in time and space. Humans are, after all, four-dimensional worms. No, I don’t mean in Doctor Who, I mean in real life—hear me out.

      Our universe has four dimensions: three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time. We tend to think of our bodies as only being extended in space; they stretch from the tops of our heads to the tips of our feet, from our left side to our right side, and from our back to our front. However, we’re also extended in the fourth dimension, time, stretching from the moment we’re born (or thereabouts) to the time we die. If you could see the entirety of a human life all at once, what you’d see would be something like a worm in space-time, stretching through every place and every time that the person had occupied during their life.⁹

      Given this, it seems tempting to believe that bodily identity over time consists in being part of a single four-dimensional worm in four-dimensional space-time. In other words, it’s tempting to believe that a body at one time is the same body that existed at an earlier time if both are part of the same continuous object. Applying this to regeneration, we might accept that the body that looked like Christopher Eccleston is the same body as the body that looks like David Tennant because there’s spatiotemporal continuity between the two; that is, because the Eccleston body was immediately replaced at exactly the same point in space by the Tennant body. Similarly, we might say that it’s spatiotemporal continuity that provides the sameness of the body that looks like a Krillitane and the body that looks like a headmaster in School Reunion, of the mustached body before the Brigadier has his shave and the mustacheless body after his shave, of your body before and after you cut your finger, and so on.

      There’s a tidiness to identifying sameness of body with spatiotemporal continuity and sameness of person with sameness of body. However, there’re also some big problems with this view. Three in particular might strike those who watch enough (or too much) Doctor Who.

      • Firstly, it seems at least conceivable that a person could fail to have any body at all, which would mean that what makes them them can’t be the spatiotemporal continuity of their body.

      • Secondly, it seems at least conceivable that a single person might be made up of spatiotemporally discontinuous parts (that means that they might jump about in time and space a bit—who does that remind you of?).

      • Thirdly, it seems at least conceivable that the same body might be inhabited by different people at different times.

      Let’s look at each of these problems in turn.

      The Problem of People with No Bodies

      Problem One for the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-bodies criterion for personal identity is that it seems at least conceivable that a person might exist with no body. In fact, the Doctor runs across people like that all the time.

      They may have lost everything below the neck, such as the Master’s army of decapitated humans faced by the Tennant Doctor in Last of the Time Lords (2007). Alternatively, they may be mere disembodied brains, such as those met by the Hartnell Doctor in The Keys of Marinus (1964), or the brain of Morbius, met by the Tom Baker Doctor in, appropriately, The Brain of Morbius (1976). Presumably, the Cybermen themselves are essentially human brains in robot shells and, at least during their first appearance with the Hartnell Doctor in The Tenth Planet (1966), they see human identity as lasting through a replacement of bodily parts.

      It’s open to the champion of the spatiotemporal continuity view of identity to insist that spatiotemporal continuity of the brain is what’s really important, not the entire body, since it’s the brain that actually does the thinking. However, some poor souls in the Doctor Who universe don’t have any physical form at all. For example, the Refusians met by the Hartnell Doctor in The Ark (1966) lost their bodies as a result of an accident, the Great Intelligence met by the Troughton Doctor in The Abominable Snowmen (1967) and The Web of Fear (1968) likes to live in silver balls but is perfectly capable of floating around bodilessly, the Pertwee Doctor learns that the Time Lord Omega has become nonphysical in The Three Doctors (1972), and the Davison Doctor battles the incorporeal snake-spirit the Mara in Kinda (1982) and Snakedance (1983).

      Peripheral cases would include creatures with bodies made of energy, like the party-crashing Mandragora Helix fought by the Tom Baker Doctor in The Masque of Mandragora (1976) and the television-possessing entity known as The Wire fought by the Tennant Doctor in The Idiot’s Lantern (2006).

      The Problem of People Who Materialize Out of Nowhere

      A second problem with the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-body view of personal identity is that we can make perfect sense of stories in which people move about in a way that breaks spatiotemporal continuity. In fact, breaking spatiotemporal continuity is what Doctor Who is all about. The Doctor can dematerialize in modern London and rematerialize on the planet Skaro in the far future, or Rome in the ancient past, or even in another dimension. If we were to try to plot his spatiotemporal worm, there’d be a jumble of isolated pieces all over the place without connection to each other. For example, there’s going to be a section of Doctor Worm that begins suddenly when he lands in Pompeii in 79 A.D. in The Fires of Pompeii (2008), without being directly connected to anything that was there in Pompeii before, and ends suddenly when he leaves Pompeii a few days later, without being directly connected to anything that’s still in Pompeii afterwards. Whatever it is that makes this disconnected worm section the same person as the disconnected worm section who adventured in 100,000 B.C. in An Unearthly Child (1963), it doesn’t seem to be spatiotemporal continuity.

      TARDIS travel might be thought to be a special case because TARDIS flight seems to take place in its own private timeline, giving the crew time to banter, squabble, and explain the plot. However, there are innumerable other cases in Doctor Who in which such travel is instantaneous. In fact, there are examples of this in every era of the television series:

      • the Hartnell Doctor finds a Dalek transmat (teleport) system in The Dalek Masterplan (1965),

      • the Troughton Doctor finds space flight dominated by transmat in The Seeds of Death (1969),

      • the Pertwee Doctor faces blobs who teleport people into the heart of a black hole in The Three Doctors,

      • the Tom Baker Doctor finds an entire planet that tele-ports around space mining other planets in The Pirate Planet (1978),

      • the Davison Doctor learns that a renegade Time Lord is using a time scoop to abduct people from time and space in The Five Doctors (1983),

      • the Colin Baker Doctor meets a tyrant who eliminates rebels by teleporting them randomly in time and space by throwing them into the timelash in Timelash (1985),¹⁰

      • the McCoy Doctor gets teleported to another planet by small cats in Survival,

      • the Eccleston Doctor’s companion, Rose, gets teleported to the Dalek flagship in Bad Wolf (2005),

      • and the Tennant Doctor gets transported through space and time to the 1960s by the Weeping Angels in Blink (2007).

      However outrageous these adventures might be, the stories make sense to us. We understand that the character who steps into a transmat chamber is the same character as the one who instantly steps out of another transmat chamber a million miles away, despite the lack of spatiotemporal continuity. So again, the concept of sameness of person doesn’t seem to require spatiotemporal continuity.

      The Problem of Possession

      A third problem with the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-body account of personal identity is that it seems conceivable that a spatiotemporally continuous body might have different people inhabiting it at different times. In fact, this happens all the time on Doctor Who. In such cases, not only do we have personal identity without spatiotemporal continuity of body, we have spatiotemporal continuity of body without personal identity.

      Perhaps the most impressive example of this is the Tom Baker Doctor’s enemy Eldrad from The Hand of Fear (1976), who goes through five bodies in six episodes: first an unseen alien in a spacecraft, then a disembodied hand, then the body of Sarah Jane Smith, then a female body made of rock and finally a male body made of rock. The Master is similarly certain that he can survive a change of bodies and happily steals the body of Nyssa’s father in The Keeper of Traken (1981). The Davison Doctor’s companion Tegan positively makes a hobby of having her body possessed by alien entities, being possessed by the Mara in Kinda and again in Snakedance. Similarly, in New Earth (2006), Cassandra possesses the body of both the Tennant Doctor and his companion Rose. (Since Cassandra is just a human being like the rest of us, this is probably the most amazing event in the history of Doctor Who. I can’t work out how she did it. I’ve been trying to possess the neighbors all morning and I’m getting nowhere.)

      It’s worth stressing again here that the argument isn’t that disembodied existence, teleportation, time-travel, possession or any other form of spatiotemporal discontinuity must be possible in real life just because they’re possible on Doctor Who. Rather, the point is that since stories that feature these things are perfectly understandable as stories, spatiotemporal continuity mustn’t be essential to our conception of personal identity. If I tell you that the Doctor found a square circle, or met a married bachelor, or landed on a planet of mammal insects, you’d have no idea what I meant. My statements would make no sense because it’s part of the idea of a circle that it isn’t square, of a bachelor that he isn’t married and of a mammal that it isn’t an insect. On the other hand, if I tell you that the Doctor disappeared from London in his TARDIS and reappeared in New York, or that Omega survived without his body, or that Sarah Jane Smith’s body was possessed by Eldrad, you understand the story I’m telling perfectly well. This suggests that spatiotemporal continuity isn’t part of the concept of personal identity, and so personal identity isn’t a matter of spatiotemporal continuity.

      Are You Your Memories?

      If we don’t accept the spatiotemporal continuity model, in what else might we try to find personal identity? One possibility is that we find it in memory. For instance, we might declare that to be you is simply a matter of having your memories. That’d certainly handle a lot of the problem cases we’ve looked at above.

      The David Tennant Doctor might not look like the original William Hartnell Doctor, but as we saw in The Fires of Pompeii, he still remembers that, as the Hartnell Doctor, he was responsible for the burning of Rome in The Romans (1965). In The City of Death (1979), the Tom Baker Doctor who steps out of his TARDIS in Renaissance Italy is spatiotemporally discontinuous with the Doctor who stepped into his TARDIS in modern Paris, but he still remembers boarding in Paris with the intention of traveling back through time. Similarly, the bodiless Omega remembers all too clearly being the bodied Omega who was abandoned by the ungrateful Time Lords, and Eldrad, in all his/her bodies, remembers all too clearly being the Eldrad who was exiled by the ungrateful Kastrians. What’s more, the memory criterion seems to be (at least sometimes) endorsed by the Doctor himself. After all, in The Five Doctors, the Davison Doctor tells his companion Tegan a man is the sum of his memories you know, a Time Lord even more so, while in The Planet of the Ood (2008), the Tennant Doctor tells his companion Donna, memory and emotions ... without it, you wouldn’t be Donna. Then again, the Doctor told us in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) that Earth

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